FAI will be used at debconf5 to maintain the computer infrastructure for this debian conference.

A patched version of FAI (based on 2.8.4 from sarge) will be used, the most important fix is the ability to access the fai configdir via subversion. You can download it from layer-acht.org/fai-files.

After you installed the .deb you can simply invoke a softupdate (USE AT YOUR OWN RISK (OR USE DEDICATED TEST MACHINES!) THIS HAS NOT BEEN TESTED VERY WIDELY SO FAR) by running:

sudo fai -N softupdate

To store the configdir, a alioth project has been set up, see alioth.debian.org/projects/fai-config-dir/.

To check it out anonymously in the the directory ./config issue the following command:

svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/fai-config-dir/trunk/debconf5 ./config

Or, if you have an alioth account, use:

svn co svn+ssh://$your_alioth_id@svn.debian.org/svn/fai-config-dir/trunk/debconf5 ./config

To make use of FAI at debconf5 we need to have a list of machines before the conference starts and the assigned use cases of each machines. (We need more than this... ;-) For example, we also need a "static" dhcp-setup so we have the machines mapped to "static" dns-names.

Based on that list, we can then assign some classes based on the hostnames in

./config/class/55-debconf5-classes